TRACEY EMIN

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.

A man doesn't know what it's like to be a woman; it's that simple.

There's so much stuff said about me that's not true, so now if something is hurtful and wrong, I send an e-mail or letter immediately, saying, This is not true.

They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

It pleases me that people can be interactive.

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay.

I know I'm supposed to say ageing doesn't bother me, then suddenly you're like, 'Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I'm getting old. I'm old!'

All the mistakes I've ever made in my life have been when I've been drunk. I haven't made hardly any mistakes sober, ever, ever.

I've been making bronze sculptures for a long time. My sculptures are wholly unsuccessful and uncommercial. No one is even the remotest bit interested in them. So it's almost like my hobby.

When you're 20 or 30, looking ahead, you see these benchmarks for relationships, career, ambition, sexuality, and they went off into infinity. When you get to 50, you look at what's ahead of you, and there's an end. It goes into a nothingness, a void.

My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.

Women, at 50, are on a plateau with their careers, but later they ascend.

If I didn't want to work for a couple of years, I wouldn't have to-it's a great feeling, to know I'm doing it because I want to do it.

It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.

It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me.

I've got to start using my brain more - I've got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.

I didn't have an exhibition anywhere until I was 30. My first exhibition was at 30, and then for my first show in America, I'm 50. It's kind of all right: I'm just a slow burner.

There's different kinds of love, and I'd never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love I've experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that there's this other love out there.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

I'm out of here, I'm better than all of you.

People try constantly to use me, and I hate it.